They Say Art Is Dead in New York. They’re Wrong.

Image

Clockwise from top left: “The Dreary Coast,” performed on the Gowanus Canal; founders of the Silent Barn, an arts collective in Bushwick; N. D. Austin, in hat, at a guerrilla party in a Manhattan building; inside Secret Project Robot, a Bushwick arts space.CreditCreditClockwise: Byron Smith for The New York Times, Benjamin Norman for The New York Times, Benjamin Norman for The New York Times, Benjamin Norman for The New York Times.

The invitation came by email: I was to present myself at 9 p.m. that Saturday in the lobby of the New Yorker Hotel on Eighth Avenue and 34th Street. Without explanation, I was told to come alone, dress warmly, bring a bottle of bourbon and, on arrival, keep an eye out for a mysterious “agent” in a red beret.

I had received the note, in response to one of my own, from N. D. Austin and Ida C. Benedetto, the trespass artists who, to great acclaim last year, secretly — and illegally — turned a water tower in Chelsea into a speakeasy. The day before the invitation, I had written to them, as I had to others, with a question I’d been thinking about for weeks: Was the city’s creative underground really dead, as people often said?

What ended up happening that night was proof that it was not. At the appointed hour, 15 or 20 of us gathered in the lobby, eyeing one another and trying to blend into a crowd of innocent tourists. A few minutes later, the agent, indeed in a beret, rose from a sofa and strolled out the door.

All of us followed as she ducked around the corner and whisked us into a building — a large commercial structure, empty, dusty, obviously under construction. With no idea where we were going, we were led up 16 flights of stairs, in the dark, and then out onto the roof. There we saw the elevator room, a small brick box, which had been converted into a cramped, clandestine jazz club. A barman in a trilby offered cocktails; a chandelier of candles dangled from the ceiling. As the night went on, musicians played, an illusionist performed and the assorted guests — painters, filmmakers, an aerialist just back from Brazil — stood among the huge industrial motors, talking about the only-in-New-York-ness of it all, which was, of course, the point.

Somehow, in the last few years, it has become an article of faith that New York has lost its artistic spirit, that the city’s long run as a capital of culture is over. After all (or so the argument goes), foreign oligarchs and hedge-fund traders have bought up all the real estate, chased away the artists and turned the bohemia that once ran east from Chumley’s clear across the Williamsburg Bridge into a soulless playground of money.

Image

Amour Obscur playing at the party in an elevator room.CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times

Last year, the foremost proponent of this doomsday theory was the rock star David Byrne, who complained in The Guardian that artists, as a species, had been priced out of New York. This year, others joined him. The novelist Zadie Smith lamented in October, in The New York Review of Books, that the city’s avant-garde had all but disappeared. The musician Moby wrote a comparable essay in February, describing how creative types are fleeing New York and referring to his former home, accurately but narrowly, as “the city of money.” Just a couple of weeks ago, Robert Elmes, the founder of the Galápagos Art Space in Brooklyn, declared the indigenous “creative ecosystem” was in crisis — so, naturally, he was moving to Detroit.

But what you cannot argue — at least, not according to many artists — is that art in New York is dead. Yes, the rents are high, but people are adapting by living in increasingly inventive ways, at places like the Silent Barn, an arts collective in Bushwick, Brooklyn, or 3B, an artist-run bed-and-breakfast near Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. Yes, the finance economy has brought about the $50 entree and the $3,000 studio apartment, but it’s also provided decent-paying side jobs, not to mention an audience.

In terms of the work itself, the supremacy of real estate and capital that so many people carp about has helped define a new New York aesthetic, one that has moved away from traditional disciplines like painting and sculpture into a more itinerant, guerrilla-style version of performance art. Whether it’s the madcap anarchy of Brooklyn’s annual Bike Kill, in which tattooed lunatics joust on homemade cycles, or the Junxion, a secret cell of artists who drive school buses of marching bands and fire-spinners to remote locations (say, underneath the Kosciuszko Bridge), this wacky and transgressive method of creation is D.I.Y. in spirit and armed with tactics that draw upon graffiti, punk rock, the Situationists and the Occupy movement.

Acknowledging the city’s rising affluence in order to oppose it, this neo-New York School tends to look at obstacles like security deposits — or security guards — as potential opportunities, and does so with a rebel zeal for reclaiming the streets.

Image

A partygoer leaving the elevator room.CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times

None of which means the visual arts no longer have a place. It’s hard to imagine an up-and-coming painter showing in the megagalleries of Chelsea, but many emerging artists have found a home in Bushwick, where a few months ago the Clearing Gallery opened a 5,000-square-foot exhibition space in a former truck repair shop, around the corner from the Brooklyn outpost of the blue-chip Chelsea show house Luhring Augustine. “The neighborhood is very much alive right now,” said Olivier Babin, Clearing’s French-born owner. “There’s literally hundreds of artists’ studios within blocks of here.” To Ms. Benedetto, the co-host of the jazz club, the rumors of New York’s demise aren’t only exaggerated — they’re completely wrong.

“I’ve been here for a decade and a half,” she said, “and I’m always finding something new. There’s an amazing productive energy here — it’s exciting, it’s refreshing. You never exhaust New York.”

In mid-November, the artist Jeff Stark took part in a panel discussion on performance at Parsons the New School for Design. During the Q. and A., a guy in the crowd raised his hand and started in on the arts scene in New York.

“It was that classic argument,” Mr. Stark recalled. “ 'Where’s the city of Andy Warhol? Where’s the city of Patti Smith? Why are artists even coming here today?’ I had to tell him people are coming here because it’s interesting.”

Mr. Stark would know. As part of his portfolio, he edits Nonsense NYC, an email list of artistic happenings around the city. Nonsense goes out weekly to hundreds of subscribers, calling attention to a movable feast of odd events — midnight concerts on basketball courts, a fixed-gear bike race in a repurposed Brooklyn church — curiosities to compete with anything that went on years ago at the Factory or CBGB.

Image

Angora Peaks at the Silent Barn.CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times

In recent years, Mr. Stark has also produced some of the city’s most innovative and logistically challenging theater pieces. In 2013, he and a partner created the Empire Drive-In, a beneath-the-stars movie house complete with junked cars as seats and a 40-foot screen of salvaged wood. Just this fall, he mounted “The Dreary Coast,” an immersive retelling of the Persephone myth in which 20 or so audience members (after signing waivers) climbed aboard a motorized skiff and puttered down the Gowanus Canal to watch the show.

“Whenever people ask me if New York is over, my response is that the coolest stuff I’ve seen here has been in the last two years,” said Mr. Stark, who is 42 and has lived in the city since 1999. “Artists make art that reflects the space they’re in, and since we’re in New York, which is expensive, people have started making crazy outdoor art or temporary, pop-up stuff — weird, little culture happenings, sometimes in public places, sometimes in the middle of the night.”

Embedded in the premise that art in New York is dead is often a fetishized nostalgia for the 1970s and early ’80s, a cheaper, more chaotic time when high crime, civic neglect and the threat of bankruptcy opened whole neighborhoods to artists. Ms. Smith indulged in this a few years ago when she declared at a PEN event that young artists shouldn’t bother moving to New York because the city wouldn’t support them now as it did in her day. And here’s what Moby wrote about a slightly later period: “AIDS, crack and a high murder rate kept most people away from New York back then. But even though it was a war zone, or perhaps to some extent because it was a war zone, Manhattan was still the cultural capital of the world.”

Setting aside the effect of that war zone on ordinary people, the hypothesis seems questionable. Is it really the case that public chaos inspires creativity? That art not only thrives, but thrives best, in an atmosphere of lawlessness and danger?

“When things are screwed up, when they are dangerous, it’s easy to be creative — because it feels like there are no rules,” said Chris Hackett, a dangerous artist if there ever was one. (When I dropped by Mr. Hackett’s studio in Brooklyn last month, he was fabricating daggers and had just built a crossbow out of truck parts.) “But making creativity easier doesn’t necessarily make it better.”

Image

A performance of “The Dreary Coast.”CreditByron Smith for The New York Times

What I heard time and again from the artists I talked to was that they were sick of being told how gritty and awesome the city used to be and how corporatized and boring it was now. Some said the complainers were simply looking back on their youth through rose-colored glasses. (“People get old,” Mr. Stark shrugged. “They don’t get out as much.”) Some just didn’t believe the myth. (“I used to go to CBGB,” Mr. Hackett said. “CBGB was a rathole.”) Others were annoyed by the glamorizing of disorder, especially by artists who had escaped it into success, doubly-especially when so many younger artists are trying hard to subvert New York’s more regimented climate through their work.

Mike Tummolo, for instance, is a founding member of the Junxion, the group that drives around in school buses with Merry Prankster nicknames, like the Mighty Bird and the Music Wagon. Mr. Tummolo has been putting on events in the city for more than a decade, and acknowledged that things were simpler years ago when space was less expensive and even raucous gatherings were more or less ignored by the police. But it was only after he and his partners, in response to financial and security pressures, literally took their act on the road that they felt they had accomplished something.

“It was bumming us out that everything had to be so legal these days,” he said. “Fire codes, liquor licenses, whatever. But then we thought, ‘Wait a second, do we even really need a space? We’ve got five school buses at our disposal. We can go wherever we want.' ” Now, he said, the city’s entire landscape is his nightclub. “The magic,” he said, “is still happening.”

You hear a lot these days about Detroit, New Orleans, Minneapolis — fresh new meccas where the rent is cheap and the cops don’t hassle you, man. They have that vibe, people say, that edge that New York used to have. There’s a real community thing going on.

But then, the community in New York, especially in the D.I.Y. arts underground, is pretty robust. The barman at the rooftop jazz club, for example, used to date a woman who is known for throwing Gatsby-era costume parties, who is herself friends with a film and theater designer who often collaborates with Mr. Hackett, who has long known Mr. Austin, who, a few years back, held an illicit event atop the Williamsburg Bridge in partnership with the Brooklyn street artist who introduced me to Mr. Tummolo. And so on.

Image

Bubbles, an electronic pop/synth group, at Secret Project Robot.CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times

More and more, these casual friendship networks have started coalescing into formal structures, like, say, the Family, an under-the-radar, invitation-only downtown studio run by the French photographer J. R. Hoping to establish a free-form commune of ideas that focuses more on inspiration than production, J. R. hosts — free of charge — obscure creators visiting New York, like Os Gêmeos, the identical-twin graffiti artists from Brazil, and then brings in celebrities like David Blaine or Robert De Niro to enhance the mix.

One of the city’s most sophisticated arts collectives now is the Silent Barn, a work and living space in a former construction-company office in Bushwick. Its sprawling compound boasts not only apartments, a large kitchen, a performance stage, a recording studio, a barber shop and a public record store, but also a courtyard with a seasonal vegetable garden and a 1970s-vintage mobile home, the Canned Ham, that serves as a project space and a crash pad for out-of-town musicians.

When I went to talk with people at the Silent Barn this month, they told me the place was struggling but surviving, largely on the income from renting out artist studios and rooms (for about $800 a month) and from the bar, which, they joked, has taken the place of the traditional angel donor. But they also said communal living wasn’t just about sharing groceries or the gas bill; it was, as well, a way of fending off the alienating aspects of the artist’s life.

“In some sense, the nightmare in New York isn’t being broke, it’s being stuck in a shoe box writing emails into the void asking to play at someone’s bar or to do a show at someone’s gallery,” said Joe Ahearn, a founding member of the space. “There’s lots of things we don’t do well, but one thing we do do well is to combat that kind of isolation.”

Any number of alternative art spaces have died in recent years: Monster Island, the Hose, Goodbye Blue Monday. The turnover is itself evidence of the city’s fecundity, even if the Silent Barn is trying to escape a similar fate. Conscious of the role that artists often play in gentrification, part of their strategy is to build social capital and strengthen ties to their community through programs like Educated Little Monsters, which brings in neighborhood children for performance and art classes. Another part is to do things that artists aren’t supposed to do or to do well: make budgets, find investors, file certificates of occupancy, buy liability insurance.

“To survive for the long term, we have to grow up and have adult conversations about stuff like loans and workers’ compensation,” said Nathan Cearley, a Silent Barn veteran, who also works as a schoolteacher, plays in a “void drone” band called Long Distance Poison and serves on the collective’s working group for logistical issues, which is known as Risky Bizness.

“I don’t see David Byrne investing in real estate and trying to lower prices so that artists can stay here,” Mr. Cearley said. (Mr. Byrne responded in an email that he failed to see how a real-estate investment, “even if I had the spare cash,” would lower rents for artists.)

Mr. Cearley then went on: “If David Byrne isn’t interested in art anymore” — in his email Mr. Byrne said that he was — “I suppose that’s good to know. But we are. So instead complaining about the end of art in New York, I’d love to see him save it. Because he can write us a check anytime he wants.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: They Say Art Is Dead in New York. They’re Wrong.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe